Call of Duty Elite emerged alongside Activision’s much anticipated launch of Modern Warfare 3; the service would merge social and stat tracking for players to keep abreast of the exploits of friends and teammates. However, the service is suffering a multitude of glitches, crashes, and setbacks that have shown that it might not be quite prepared for prime time.

According to an article published on GameIndustry (registration required) the service has been down from almost the day of its inception. The developer studio for the social media interface, Beachhead, is said to be working “around the clock” attempting to correct the issues, but it’s leading only to further instability in the game itself.

Activision’s Daniel Suarez, the VP of publishing for Call of Duty, conducted a long interview with Joystiq in which he promised players that a fix would be coming soon.

“The launch of MW3 had been huge and we knew it would be huge,” he said. “It just translated into a tremendous amount of traffic to Elite. And we anticipated it to be big, it just turned out to be even bigger than that.

“The high demand from the console application and registration on the website from the PC really crippled the registration and login process which then translated into the backend servers being slammed,” Suarez added.

“So we’ve been working around the clock to alleviate access into the system and we’ve had a large number of people now able to register. We’ve resolved that piece of it and now we’re actually working on getting the service back up and running to a point where people can then enjoy it.”

Just this week, some drama arose around the Call of Duty: Elite service coming to PC when a tweet from Activision’s CoD: Elite twitter account sent the message: “We are working towards a universal Elite experience but we cannot guarantee if or when a version will be available for the PC.”

PC players took this as a death knell for the service and arose in frustrated hordes to shoot back against the tweet, demanding an explanation. Activision quickly backpedaled on their tweet stating in a follow-up tweet that they “misspoke.”

“We misspoke. Our goal has always been to provide a free PC offering for Elite. Stay tuned for an update as timing is still being determined.”

Social scoreboards and stats lead the charge for making games more fun

Social media interfaces embedded in games do a lot to bring players together. The standard system, developed out of modern massively multiplayer online gaming involves adding friends to a “buddy list” that can then be used to invite friends to play games alongside you or message them whilst during gameplay.

Call of Duty: Elite is designed to take that to the next level by introducing something akin to the Battlelog feature introduced at E3 2011 by Electronic Arts for Battlefield 3. The system collates combat stats for the player (and friends) to see in a profile and use as an aggregated feed of their performance, strengths, and weaknesses. Activision claims the system would be useful for players to up their game by determining where they needed practice and what sort of scenarios they could put more work into.

Upping the social aspect of games that draw people together is a big component of gathering and keeping players interested. Microsoft is also no stranger to this, as they’ve been working hard on making Xbox LIVE more social and branching it out even away from the console into the remote world of mobile.

Facebook games, Zynga, and others already have taken a huge bite out of the social in-game media outlets, it’s time for competitive first-person shooters to take a stand and really charge up their networking. These games draw in millions of players from across the world through PC, Xbox LIVE, and the PlayStation Network.

The game with the best solution will find themselves at the top rung of the ladder when it comes time to pick a box from the shelf.